By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.